Criteria for plausibility

[Cogidubnus]

Or (hard evidence lacking otherwise) it might just be as it was originally presented...believe as you please (in the end it matters not)...

Good wishes

Dave

[Jonathan H]

'The Report from Iron Mountain'

To DRoy

Thanks for that.

You see what I mean about wide-eyed buffs like the previous poster who -- no doubt sincerely -- mangle history by perpetuating a mystery where there is none.

They are as reliable as my watch.

Just like with some of the Ripper buffs, though the huge difference is we have Oswald dead to rights with no alibi, and it's his rifle, and his work place, and his chip on his puny shoulder the size of Jupiter (in his lush fantasy life Lee Harvey was a Man-of-Destiny like Hitler and Mao).

Of course it was Oswald, and only Oswald, firing at the motorcade. There is not the slightest hard evidence to suggest anything else.

Oswald was a perpetual loner with a mad mother, a failed suicide, a wife-beater, a restless malcontent in Minsk and Dallas, who had tried to assassinate a right-wing general -- with the same rifle -- a few months before. He killed a police officer after he had killed President Kennedy, and tried to kill more in the movie theatre in which he was ultimately arrested but the cops had the drop on him.

Then he screamed police brutality.

But because Oswald was a leftist -- sort of, more of a cranky Futurist -- leftist buffs tried to get him, posthumously, off the hook in the years following the publication of the flawed Warren Report (flawed because in clearing the Communist world of complicity to avoid a nuclear war, it is wilfully and inevitably ignorant of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro -- as they did not want that perfectly good motive publicized).

Even Garrison did not claim to meet with a mysterious (and cornily named) 'Mr X', as in Stone's movie, who reveals to the DA with all the conviction of an escaped lunatic that Oswald was a fall guy for a massive and monstrous plot -- one which included the highest ranks of the military and intelligence establishment.

'X' was really an advisor to Stone's movie who was shamelessly redacted into Garrison's tale. He was the late ex-Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who in his well-practised, folksy humbug makes Dr. Tumblety look like a model of honesty and probity.

Prouty was also the worst kind of right-wing swine who denied the Holocaust.

Yet the best part is that the bombshell governmental report he hustled to Stone (and the director hustles to the audience via a beatifully persuasive Donald Sutherland), about how the war-machine must be kept regularly oiled with war profits, was a literary hoax called 'The Report from Iron Mountain' by Leonard Lewin.

An hoax at the centre of a movie with an hoax hero who believes in an hoax conspiracy plot.

You can't make this stuff up.

Which they teach in schools as historically accurate, or if not the whole truth, well, there's no smoke without fire (it's called steam, like what was coming from the Grassy Knoll).

But I myself, who am left-wing too, do subscribe to a conspiracy theory regarding JFK.

That in New Orleans, Oswald fell into the company of two anti-Castro Cubans who convinced him that they really worked for Castro as his deep cover agents. They 'encouraged' Oswald to kill Kennedy as they claimed (falsely) that it would please his hero, Fidel -- and they (code named 'Leopoldo' and 'Angelo') then tried to ensnare a rival anti-Castro group, JURE, one which was too leftist for their tastes, by having Oswald introduced to one of its members: Silivia Odio.

These dangerous adventurers had no further contact with Oswald, which is why the latter had to catch a bus after the assassination.

Incredibly this two or three-man plot worked, but the fanatical anti-Castroites' utlimate objective, to trigger the re-invasion of Cuba because JFK had been killed or at least shot at by a Fidelista, was a failure.

Fanatical anti-Red Edgar Hooveer wanted nothing to do with a political motivation because it could have cost him his job, hence the pivoting of the solution as that of a lone nut when Oswald was seriously political.

This theory comes from the Coleman-Slawson Report of 1964, a controversial and contrary sub-section of the Warren Report which was only allowed to be declassified in 1975, and then mostly ignored because, ironically, the Zapruder film was finally shown on television -- and that was misunderstood as showing a shot from the Knoll.

In terms of historical methodology the Coleman-Slawson Report as a primary source goes right against the expected bias because those two lawyers knew the agenda of the Commission was to find that Oswald was a lone loonie, and so in going against this institutional bias it is arguably, even heroically reliable.

I argue the same is applicable re: Scotland Yard Sleuth Sir Melville Macnaghten, in his choosing as 'Jack the Ripper' a man from his own class, race, and religion -- and a suicide who was inconveniently deceased two years before the 'final' murder -- rather than fixing on a handy foreign wretch.

[Roy Corduroy]

Jonathan, your contention that Macnaghten penned as guilty a man of his own class as making the case more persuasive, either stands on its own or not. Based on the history there.

I'm in total disagreement with you about the Coleman Slawson report. In the last sentence of it, the writers said "this is probably only a wild speculation." Which it was. It's thoroughly debunked in Bugliosi.

I thought I had followed your arguments and articles up to now, but you have really taken a "left turn" with the Lee Oswald thing.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

To Roy

Thanks for at least responding. We will agree to disagree, Old Socialist windbag that I am.

In my defence I would ask that you take another careful look at Vincent Bugilosi about this aspect -- a brilliant book I completely agree -- because he does not include all of the Report's key lines or theories.

Whereas Gerald Posner does not include it at all because, though a terriific writer and 'Case Closed' is superb too, he's still a lawyer-prosecutor arguing a brief against Silvia Odio -- rather than an historian weighing probabilities.

[Roy Corduroy]

Jonathan, actually I need to read Bugliosi's book again to properly discuss it. And who knows, you could be right. Oswald seems easily led.

Anyhoo, pal, we're off the deep end here. And I gotta bus to catch.

Roy

[Bridewell]

Oswald & Tippit

He killed a police officer after he had killed President Kennedy

A witness, named Acquilla Clemons, saw the two men who murdered Tippit. She described one as “kind of heavy” and the other as “tall and thin" with "light khaki trousers and white shirt".

"Kind of heavy" doesn't fit Oswald. Nor does "white shirt" unless Oswald changed into a brown one prior to his arrest.

If neither of these men was Oswald he didn't kill Tippit. If one of them was Oswald, he had an accomplice - and therefore wasn't a lone assassin.

Certainly none of them was involved in the Whitechapel Murders unless the MO included use of a time machine.

Regards, Bridewell

[Jonathan H]

To Bridewell

What you are doing is narrowing the evidence for-and-against Oswald in the killing of Tippit (whom the little coward shot several times, paused, and then methodically stood over his prone body and shot him in the head) to a single, demonstrably unreliable witness.

If you or anybody examines all the available evidence you will see that it overwhelmingly favours the official version: Oswald killed Tippit.

Not coincidentally, the same suspect pulled a loaded revolver on police in the theatre, minutes later, and tried to off a couple more.

The Oswald-as-martyr myth is a real litmus test for whether you see that not all theories are in equipoise. Some are strong and others are pathetic, to the point of intellectual fraud.

Stone's 'JFK' does not tell you that Oswald arrived at work with an oblong package, that he had changed his routine to unexpectedly go to Ruth Paine's house the night before -- where his rifle was lying under a blanket in her garage -- and that he left his wedding ring in an eggcup and all the money he had for his still sleeping ex-wife who had, also the night before, refused to take him back (understandably since he was abusive).

Leftist Buffs in the mid-60's sent the whole counter-investigation in the wrong direction, hunting as they were for evidence of more gunmen in the shadows. For if you can find another accomplice then maybe Lee Harvey was a 'patsy' as he claimed (though he meant because he had lived in the Soviet Union, not that he was being framed by some vast conspiracy).

That Oswald killed Kennedy without help in Dealey Plaza is not in serious doubt except among those who resist stubborn facts while simultaneously embracing the siren song of fantasists, who commit the buffs to fraud and fakery.

What remains a serious question is did Oswald have help, or 'encouragement' not on the day but before Nov. 22nd?

For Oswald the Communist, who had lived in Russia, who was publicly pro-Castro, who had taken a shot at General Walker (a fact strongly suspected by a dodgy, White Russian businessman who also liaised with the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division), who was seemingly impersonated in Mexico City, was an assassin made to order for certain extreme right-wingers seeking a casus belifor a second and successful 'Bay of Pigs' invasion.

That is the trail which needed to be followed by both officials and amateurs in 1963/4, among the murky, internecine world of the anti-Castro movement, one riddled with Castro's operatives, but it was not taken until -- and only fitfully -- in the late 1970's and by then it was a very cold trail indeed.

Even anti-JFK/conspiracy author Vincent Bugliosi concedes that the Odio Incident is the only tangible evidence for a possible plot; that the anti-Castro Cubans and their groupies had the means, the motive, and the opportunity, what with Oswald dropping into their midst to make it happen.

Yet he dismisses it because of a lack of hard evidence.

That's fair enough, but I believe that the Coleman-Slawson Report pointed to the possibility of a very loose 'plot' by just two wankers who met a third wanker, and fooled and misled and tempted that third oddball, eg. wound him up like a lethal toy and then let him go ...

[Bridewell]

What you are doing is narrowing the evidence for-and-against Oswald in the killing of Tippit (whom the little coward shot several times, paused, and then methodically stood over his prone body and shot him in the head) to a single, demonstrably unreliable witness.

If you or anybody examines all the available evidence you will see that it overwhelmingly favours the official version: Oswald killed Tippit.

Hi Jonathan,

I'll start a thread in the Pub Talk area, as we're moving well away from the subject of this one. (Don't want you to think I'm ignoring the above though).

Regards, Bridewell.

Addition: Thread in 'Pub Talk' : "Did Lee Harvey Oswald Kill Officer J D Tipping?" is up and running.